Chapter 8: Steel

Joris let go of my arm.

I put my grey hand flat on the gate.

The iron was cold and wet, and I could feel the warden's weight shaking it from the other side.

I had never tried to unmake anything that wasn't alive.

A body has seams because it grew.

Iron has seams too, I found, because somebody made it.

I could feel where every bar had been hammered out and where each one had been forged into the next.

I pushed the mending the other way.

Nothing happened.

The iron was too cold and too old, and it didn't want to come apart.

Daan's face was against the bars, and the warden's legs were closing around him.

I pushed harder, until my arm shook to the shoulder and my teeth hurt.

Then the first seam gave under my palm.

It felt like a knot slipping.

The next seam gave, and the next, and then the whole gate went at once.

It fell to red grit from top to bottom, with a sound.

Daan fell through the place where it had been and landed on the top step at my feet.

The warden came up after him.

I stepped over my brother and went down one step to meet it.

It was so big that its head scraped the stone roof of the stair.

Its foreleg came down beside me, as thick as a tree trunk and pale as a candle.

I put my hand on it.

The warden came apart on the stair of the Mouth in front of the whole market.

It went from the leg up, joint by joint, until a heap of pale pieces slid down the steps into the dark.